PeopleSoft this week teamed up with IBM to provide CRM solutions for mid-sized organizations.
Customer relationship management (CRM) firm PeopleSoft seemed extremely unwise a few years ago in purchasing the Vantive solution. While it was technologically good enough to compete against archrivals Clarify and Scopus, the market was beginning to change dramatically. Solutions in the new market needed to be web-architected and able to support SMEs as well as the typical Fortune 2000 buyers of the past. PeopleSoft had to spend two years re-engineering Vantive to enter this market. Re-released in 2000, the new enterprise solution was lauded for its flexibility and web architecture.
Now in 2001, PeopleSoft aims to take a still lighter version of this solution to the mid-market. In conjunction with IBM, PeopleSoft is offering the product to mid-market businesses with less than $500 million in revenues as an ‘out of the box’ solution. PeopleSoft claims that this solution can be successfully integrated in only 12 weeks. In order to achieve this, many of the user preferences are templated/pre-configured. While this is limiting in some respects, it does provide a substantial portion of the flexibility a typical mid-market user would require.
The challenge for PeopleSoft is that many other major CRM players like Siebel and Oracle are also going after the mid-market. PeopleSoft’s re-engineering period has left it out of the media eye for quite a while in the CRM arena and it faces a real challenge in increasing awareness. However, recognition of its ERP systems remains strong and links to these systems could prove a significant asset against Siebel in aiming for the mid-market.
At time of going to press it wasn’t clear whether PeopleSoft was going to be offering its new solution on a hosted basis. PeopleSoft would certainly be unwise to ignore this market, as the ASP model offers CRM vendors potentially the most effective route to SMEs. By 2005, this market is expected be worth $724 million to CRM software vendors in North America and Western Europe alone.
